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Introduction

Although an
opera is primarily a musical experience, it relies on all the other performing arts as well as on the arts of theatrical stagecraft. Opera is a drama sung to the accompaniment of an orchestra. Although the fabric of the opera may be interrupted by spoken dialogue or recitatives accompanied by a keyboard or by the orchestra, the distinguishing feature is that the drama is conveyed by and through music.

The word opera means “work” in Italian and is short for the Italian opera in musica. This term embraces many related art forms, including opera buffa, or comic opera, and opera seria, an 18th-century Italian form with a heroic or legendary subject.

Related forms include the German singspiel, a lighter form that also includes spoken drame lyrique, a French hybrid form that includes spoken text; and the American musical theater as developed by such composers as Leonard Bernstein in West Side Story, Michael Bennett in A Chorus Line, and Stephen Sondheim in Sunday in the Park with George. What all these art forms share is the reliance on a multiplicity of talents needed to get them produced on the stage. Every opera starts with a collaboration between a composer and librettist, or author, who writes or adapts the opera’s story. Then a cast must be assembled. Not only must the members of the cast be vocally accomplished, but they must be able to act plausibly, lending their stage portraits dramatic realism. For a fully staged production there is also the need for an orchestra and often a chorus and a troupe of dancers. To train these artists musically, there is a team of coaches and conductors. To train them dramatically, there are theatrical specialists. To bring the production to life on stage, a designer must conceive a series of sets, which must then be built and put in place on the opera-house stage. A stage director is needed to assure that all the singers know their movements throughout the opera, and finally a conductor is responsible for leading the entire production in performance.

Precursors

Opera as known today is an Italian invention dating from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. However, ancient Greek drama was one of the inspirations, as it incorporated singing, declamation, and dancing to tell a narrative tale. Another precursor of opera is the music drama of the Middle Ages. After what seems an artistic gap of almost a millennium, the clergy in the 10th century developed an Easter play. This representation was derived from a kernel of dramatic dialogue found in the Easter mass and was performed with music, costumes, and rudimentary sets.

While the development of this sort of primitive opera was limited by its sacred surroundings, it nonetheless showed how various arts could be fused into a greater whole. These works included solo songs, duets, and trios as well as vocal solos with chorus and choral episodes alone. Yet these liturgical vignettes lacked the musical resources, the dramatic scope, and the intellectual framework to qualify them as true operas.

Florentine Camerata

True opera was developed by a group of musicians, poets, and scholars who met regularly in Florence, Italy, between 1580 and 1589. They became known as the Camerata. At their meetings they discussed problems concerning art and, more specifically, how to revive the tragic drama of the ancients. This aim was unattainable. Even if there had been a complete working knowledge of Greek music, the differences between the ancient system and late–16th-century tonality would have been impossible to reconcile.

Among the circle of Florentines were the famed composers Jacopo Peri, Giulio Caccini, and Vincenzo Galilei. They shared a deep dissatisfaction with the accepted style of composition, believing that it was insufficiently flexible to express a wide range of human feelings. In their compositions they took special care to find the exact dramatic inflection of their texts, the precise emotional shading, and the ideal marriage between music and words.

Some of Caccini’s works were published in 1602 in a volume aptly entitled Le nuove musiche (The New Music). In these pieces the involved contrapuntal textures of the earlier style were replaced with simple textures that let the sense of the words shine through.

In 1600, however, Peri wrote his drama per musica entitled Euridice, which was produced at the marriage celebrations of Henri IV of France and Maria de’ Medici. The work was played by a small group of strings and flutes but nonetheless made a grand impression. While the music today seems simple, at the time of its premiere it was considered revolutionary, and its success established opera as an art form of its own.

More
significant
than the Florentine operas are works written by Claudio Monteverdi. His Orfeo of 1607, first seen in Mantua, was dramatically more sophisticated than Peri’s work, and musically he was far more advanced—both in the boldness of his harmonies and the richness of his orchestrations. L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642), which Monteverdi produced for Venice, is also a dramatically developed work and like Orfeo is often performed today.

Exported from Italy

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In 1646 the young musician Giovanni Battista Lulli, working as a page, traveled to Paris from Florence. After an unsuccessful attempt to establish the Italian opera in the French court, a French opera began to thrive on its own. Its chief composer was the former page, now known as Jean-Baptiste Lully, who had come into the king’s favor as a composer of ballets. In 1672 he was put in charge of the Académie Royale de Musique, France’s major musical establishment. In that year he composed Les fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, which was one of the first French operas. Over the next 14 years Lully and the poet Philippe Quinault produced 20 operas.

Italian
opera
was imported into Germany in 1627, when the libretto to Dafne by Ottavio Rinuccini was set to music by Heinrich Schütz. (A setting of the same text, composed by Peri in 1597, is considered the first opera.) The true founder of German opera, however, is Reinhard Keiser, who wrote more than 116 works for the opera in Hamburg between 1694 and 1734. In England, at about the same time, Henry Purcell was establishing English opera with such works as Dido and Aeneas (1689) and The Fairy Queen (1692).

Handel

Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London

The
major opera composer in England in the early 18th century, however, was not an Englishman but a German. George Frideric Handel wrote his first opera in Hamburg in 1705, but he had a greater triumph in London when his Rinaldo (1711) was produced. In the next 40 years Handel wrote more than 35 operas, many of which he produced with an opera company he himself ran. Handel labored almost exclusively on pieces of this sort from 1711 to 1737, when he turned his attention to oratorios. While his oratorios were long thought to contain Handel’s finest and most popular music—Handel’s Messiah is not only his most popular oratorio but one of the most popular works of any sort—in the late 20th century his operas were finally recognized for their superior imagination and insight.

Throughout
his career, but especially in his youth, Handel was readily influenced by the music of other composers. His earliest operas—from Almira (1705) to Rodrigo (1708)—were modeled on works by Keiser. Agrippina (1709) shows the influence of the Venetian school—Antonio Caldara and Giovanni Legrenzi, for example. In such London works as Rinaldo the influence of Alessandro Scarlatti is heard.

In the mid-1720s Handel began to write operas that set new standards for inventiveness. Imaginative orchestral touches are found in Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724), and bold recitatives are heard in Orlando (1733). These details and similar moments in such masterworks as Riccardo Primo (1727), Poro (1731), and Alcina (1735) redefined the dramatic potential of opera as a vital and vivid experience.

In his operas Handel deals with subjects of three distinct types: historical, classical, and romantic. Representative of the historical operas are Giulio Cesare, Alessandro (1726), and Riccardo Primo. Classical myths are treated in Admeto (1727) and Arianna in Creta (1734), while romantic operas include Alcina, Flavio (1723), and Orlando. Regardless of the subject matter, however, Handel’s librettos are similar in that they have plots that by today’s standards are remarkably intricate and even confusing. Handel’s favorite librettist was Nicola Haym, who fashioned the texts for Teseo (1713), Radamisto (1715), Ottone (1723), and Flavio, among others. Other sources were the works of Pietro Metastasio, the Italian poet who was the leading librettist of the first half of the 18th century. A libretto by Metastasio usually presents human passions in conflict. Often based on a story first told by an ancient Latin or Greek author, Metastasio’s librettos usually featured two pairs of lovers, secondary characters, and a tyrant who in the end reveals his noble nature. These librettos gave composers many opportunities for varied scenes, including solemn rituals, military ceremonies, and rustic pastorales. The typical Metastasio libretto is cast in three acts that contain recitatives and arias. Recitatives are used to develop the dramatic action, while the arias let the characters offer commentary on their feelings or emotions. Occasionally these operas include duets, rarely larger ensembles, and a few simple choruses. Between them, Metastasio and Haym provided Handel with librettos for ten of his operas.

Gluck’s Reforms

Courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Shortly
after Handel’s last London opera, the city was visited by the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck. What he saw in 1746 seems to have reinforced his belief that the conventional Italian opera of the day was illogical and incapable of expressing faithfully the full range and intensity of human feelings. Singers were abusing their art, demanding solo arias that turned opera performances into a collection of individual showpieces. With composers willing to sacrifice dramatic integrity for the services of a favored singer, the idealistic aims of the Florentine founders of opera were betrayed.

Gluck
himself wrote pieces for many years that shared these flaws. In 1762, however, he composed Orfeo ed Euridice, a radical work that reasserted the primacy of dramatic and musical integrity in opera. He put his theories into practice: in Orfeo music is subservient to the action of the drama; arias end without the traditional da capo (repeat) section, which has no dramatic purpose; choruses and other instrumental pieces are introduced only if they reinforce the sense of the dramatic action; and singers are not given the liberty to add arias to the opera. The success of the Vienna premiere of Orfeo was such that Gluck wrote two more works for the city—Alceste (1767) and Paride ed Elena (1770). These works were less warmly received, and he moved to the more hospitable city of Paris, where he composed his late masterworks: Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), Armide (1777), and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779).

While Gluck’s reforms were not universally embraced, they were generally accepted and restored to opera the primacy of musical expression—over mere embellishment, vocal pyrotechnics, and dramatic irrelevancies—that the inventors of the art intended. By the last quarter of the 18th century, the battles over the nature of opera had largely ended. It was a resolution that affirmed the musical and theatrical principles that continue to guide the medium today.

Mozart

Courtesy of the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg, Austria

The
greatest opera composer of the last half of the 18th century, and one whom Gluck greatly influenced, was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Although Gluck was 42 years old and undeniably successful when Mozart was born in 1756, the younger composer instinctively understood Gluck’s aim and wrote a series of operas that strike an infallible balance between the competing claims of dramatic coherence and vocal display. While Mozart’s mature operas give singers many chances to display their vocal gifts, the operas are never disfigured by music that weakens the dramatic structure of his works.

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Mozart’s
first major opera, and the last significant piece he wrote before moving to Vienna from his birthplace of Salzburg, is Idomeneo (1781). Written for the opera in Munich, the work is an opera seria like two of his earlier stage works—Mitridate (1771) and Lucio Silla (1772). Unlike these earlier pieces, Idomeneo shows Mozart in full mastery of his powers. The score is full of bold dramatic and pictorial strokes such as a storm at sea and a shipwreck. Conspicuous use is made of the chorus, and there are notably larger ensembles and striking recitatives accompanied by a large and varied orchestra. Although the music is unmistakably Mozart’s—full of the composer’s sweetness and poignancy and graceful turns of phrase—it also shows the dramatic influence of Gluck and of the French tragédie lyrique. With the exception of La clemenza di Tito (The Mercy of Titus, 1791), which was composed at the end of his life, Mozart wrote no other opera seria.

Dramatically he went in the opposite direction, presenting characters recognizable in everyday life rather than remote mythological figures. The Marriage of Figaro (1786), while a comic opera, was revolutionary in the way it presented dramatically plausible characters and not the stock figures drawn by Mozart’s contemporaries.

Mozart’s insights into human emotions and motivations were profound, and he had the ability to express these insights through his music. In The Marriage of Figaro Mozart not only created characters whose actions are explained by and through their music but who gain in dramatic dimensions when they engage in ensembles. It is in these larger numbers, even more than in the solo arias, that Mozart presents his characters in all their complexity.

Although Figaro was
coolly received in Vienna, it was warmly welcomed in Prague, and its ardent reception led to the commissioning of Mozart’s next opera, Don Giovanni (1787). Mozart called the work a dramma giocoso, or “playful drama,” but the piece is not without its serious side. The Don Juan story set by Mozart was first treated by the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina in the early 1600s. The great French playwright Molière had also dealt with the story (in Le Festin de Pierre, 1665), inventing the character of Donna Elvira. But despite these and other literary treatments, it was Mozart who fashioned a story that presents Don Giovanni as a truly romantic hero. Mozart’s Don is not the unlikely mixture of bumpkin and blasphemer but a rebel whose targets are conventional authority and traditional morality. The presence of Mozart’s Don is enhanced by instrumental effects—such as the use of trombones—that give the opera a dark and solemn side. Throughout the opera Mozart weaves a psychological counterpoint of his characters’ feelings: Don Giovanni’s menace, Donna Elvira’s hurt, Donna Anna’s vengefulness, Zerlina’s innocence, Don Ottavio’s eagerness to please his beloved Donna Anna, and Masetto’s naïve devotion to his adored Zerlina. More than any other of his operas, Don Giovanni shows stylistic influences of Gluck, who had composed a Don Juan ballet based on Molière in 1761. Among Mozart’s works it is unique for its blending of comic and tragic elements.

Another opera buffa, or comic opera, is Cosí fan tutte (1790), a work that questions conventional notions of love, fidelity, and devotion. Mozart deals with these themes in the most melodious way. Cosí is thought by many opera lovers to be Mozart’s most tuneful score, and in fact its writing is especially rich in the prominent melodic use of the mellifluous intervals of the third and sixth—those intervals most removed from dissonance. Cosí also makes notable use of wind instruments, especially of Mozart’s favorite clarinet, which is often associated in his scores with expressions of love and devotion. Of all Mozart’s operas, Cosí is the clearest and most symmetrical in its dramatic construction. Two pairs of lovers are at the center of the action, which is kept in motion by the wily cynic Don Alfonso and the women’s maid Despina. For its theatrical clarity, dramatic irony, and abundant melodiousness, Cosí has won a special following among Mozart’s operas.

Two operas in German complete the Mozart canon. The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) is a romantic and comic rescue story that features exotic locales and equally exotic characters. Like many other pieces of its time, The Abduction takes advantage of the popular interest in things thought to be Turkish. Not only are the characters and locales special, but the music features such percussion instruments as cymbals and bass drum associated with an interest in the exotic.

The Magic Flute
(1791) is altogether different. Strongly influenced by the rituals known only to Mozart and his fellows in the fraternal order of Freemasons, The Magic Flute is an amalgam of comic action, vocal virtuosity, and moral instruction. Strictly speaking it is a singspiel, a work with spoken dialogue rather than recitative between scenes, but it is a singspiel far more advanced than other works of this genre. The character of Papageno provides the humorous element found in works of this sort, but the piece is made exceptional by, among other features, the virtuoso arias for the Queen of the Night and the somber arias, full of didactic wisdom, of the High Priest Sarastro.

Mozart’s librettist for The Magic Flute was Emanuel Schikaneder, a friend of the composer as well as a fellow Mason. Mozart’s librettist for what are considered his three major operas—Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosí—was Lorenzo da Ponte, a poet and man of letters. While in no way distinguished as literature, the texts he made for Mozart were ideally suited to the composer’s needs. Neither artificial nor redundant like earlier librettos, they provided a framework that let Mozart write different sorts of pieces—recitatives, arias, and ensembles—with the flexibility that instinctively he knew to be right.

More than any of his contemporaries, Mozart increased the role of the opera orchestra. In Mozart’s opera the orchestral parts are highly profiled and deftly characterized, making instrumentalists participants in the dramatic action.

Mozart also set new standards for fusing operatic structure and symphonic forms. In the Act II finale from Figaro, he creates an extended structure that shares with symphonic music large-scale relationships of tempo and harmony that meld the different ensembles—solos, duets, and larger ensembles—into a coherent and elegant whole.

After Mozart’s death the next significant opera was Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805). Beethoven’s only work in this form, Fidelio shows the influence of such contemporary composers as Ferdinando Paer, who composed an opera to the story of Fidelio a year before Beethoven; Luigi Cherubini; and Étienne-Nicolas Méhul. Fidelio is a more intense score than any produced by these other men—a work that, in its touching story of the triumph of good over evil, has come to be valued as a moral statement and not just as an opera.

Romantic Opera

Germany

The next generation of German composers explored subjects that are overtly romantic. The master of this school was Carl Maria von Weber, and his finest work is Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter, 1821), which unites an exotic, romantic setting and story with easily accessible and colorfully orchestrated melodies.

After Weber the romantic tradition was continued by such composers as Heinrich Marschner in the 1830s and Albert Lortzing in the 1840s. Their works form one of the strands that later in the century were woven by Richard Wagner into his epic music dramas.

France

At
the
end
of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, opera in France underwent a significant change. The company known as the Opéra—Lully’s Académie Royale de Musique, founded in the 17th century—fell out of favor. Tiring of its stately and lavish productions, audiences now favored the simpler productions of the Opéra-Comique. A third sort of French opera was offered by the Théâtre-Lyrique, which flourished between 1850 and 1870. Associated with this company were some of France’s most popular composers. Among the works premiered by the Théâtre-Lyrique are Charles Gounod’s Faust (1859) and Roméo et Juliette (1867); Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (1863); and the second part of The Trojans (1863) by Hector Berlioz (it was not performed complete until 1955 in Boston, Mass.). Each of these works is notable for its strong sense of melody and sure sense of theater. In Faust, which is considered his masterpiece, Gounod created a work that is still admired for its abundance of tuneful arias. Bizet, who studied with Gounod at the Paris Conservatory, refined the lyricism of his teacher. While equally melodious, Bizet’s scores are musically more sophisticated and dramatically more fully developed. Blending aspects of lyric opera with features of the grand opera, Berlioz fashioned a major work in The Trojans. This operatic spectacle recalls the large and serious works of Gluck and Gaspare Spontini even as it embraces a wide audience with a succession of memorable melodies.

Italy

In Italy opera took a different direction. Such composers as Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini created bel canto opera—opera that prizes beautiful singing above all else. After vocal excesses had been restrained by composers in the generation succeeding the reforms made by Gluck, the bel canto composers wrote lavishly. Their singers were indulged with arias that gave them ample opportunity for a prominent display of their vocal resources of range and agility.

Rossini, who
reigned as Italy’s foremost composer of the early 19th century, was a master both of melody and of stage effects. Success came easily, and while still in his teens he composed the first of a string of 32 operas that he completed by the age of 30. Many of these are comic operas, a genre in which Rossini excelled, and his masterpieces in this form are still performed and admired today. Among them are The Italian Girl in Algiers (1813), La cenerentola (Cinderella, 1817), and The Barber of Seville (1816). Characterizing Rossini’s style is an effortless sense of melody, lively rhythms, accessible harmonies, and an orchestration that is uncluttered and lucid.

Rossini’s
immediate
successor as Italy’s leading operatic composer was Donizetti, who composed more than 70 works in the genre. A less refined composer than Rossini, Donizetti left his finest work in comic operas, including L’elisir d’amore (The Love Potion, 1832), The Daughter of the Regiment (1840), and Don Pasquale (1843). His most successful serious opera, Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), continues to have a large following.

Although
he
lived for a shorter time than either Rossini or Donizetti and enjoyed a far briefer career, Bellini wrote music that surpassed theirs in refinement. His long-spun poetic melodies often recall the sentimentality of Frédéric Chopin, and his psychological insightfulness adds a dimension that had been missing in operatic recitative. Among the finest of his ten operas are La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker, 1831), Norma (1831), and I Puritani (The Puritans, 1835), all of which blend acute dramatic perceptions with florid virtuosity.

Verdi

Scala/Art Resource

This
unabashed virtuosity was tempered by the most significant of 19th-century opera composers. Giuseppe Verdi wrote virtually all of his works for the stage—from the first of his 26 operas in 1839 to his last in 1893. Throughout this series he worked continuously to refine and redefine traditions. No radical, he inherited the conventions of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini—and of Giacomo Meyerbeer—and reworked the musical language until it became totally responsive to his own needs. Verdi’s long career can be divided into three parts. Il Trovatore and La Traviata (The Troubadour and The Lady Gone Astray, both 1853) mark the end of the first period; Aïda (1871) is the culmination of the middle period; and the final period includes Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893).

Regardless
of the period, Verdi based his operas almost exclusively on works by Romantic authors of distinction, including Friedrich Schiller, Victor Hugo, and Alexander Dumas the younger. Uniting these librettos are well-defined emotional situations, strong characters, and clear-cut action. Early Verdi is rich in soaring melodies, jaunty rhythms, and orchestrations that are always effective if not always polished. More than any of his immediate predecessors, Verdi makes striking use of the chorus. Nabucco (1842) and Trovatore both have choral passages of exceptional power. Increasingly Verdi became able to depict psychological nuances with great subtlety, as in the quartet from Rigoletto (1851) and in the arias sung by Violetta in the first act of Traviata. If Verdi’s rate of production slowed somewhat in his second period, there was no corresponding slackening of quality. Among the works from this period are the epic grand opera Don Carlos (1867), which is dramatically powerful and musically advanced, and Simon Boccanegra (1857), which weaves together solos, ensembles, and choruses with dramatic daring. In Aïda the second period culminates with a work that has both features of grand opera and details of harmony, melody, and orchestration that suggest a more intimate style of expression.

In his old age Verdi composed two more masterworks—Otello and Falstaff. Based on William Shakespeare’s plays, these operas are a culmination of all the skills that Verdi learned. Flawless in form and structure, they are crafted with meticulous care in their melodies, harmonies, and orchestration. These works also are in some sense an ending point for many of the traditions of Italian opera that began with Monteverdi and his contemporaries in the early 17th century. After Verdi’s last works, opera would lose in the 20th century the dramatic scope and unity that appears to have been perfected.

Wagner

Courtesy of Richard Wagner-Gedenkstatte, Bayreuth, Germany

Although
born in the same year as Verdi, 1813, Richard Wagner developed opera in a different direction. Both composers were influenced at the start of their careers by Meyerbeer, whose grand operas—such as Les Huguenots (1836) and Le Prophète (1849)—are spectacles of unrivaled splendor. Responding to the scale and scope of these works, Wagner continued the tradition in his early operas. Rienzi (1842), a five-act grand opera, was his first success, and in the following year he produced what many consider his first masterpiece, The Flying Dutchman. Like all his major later works, this piece uses a libretto fashioned by the composer himself from a Teutonic legend. In his next opera, Tannhäuser (1845), Wagner adapted another story rich in German lore. Its subject matter—the strife between the sacred and profane—evokes from the composer a new musical richness, and the story provides occasions for musical pieces that hold their own outside the opera: the pilgrims’ chorus and the Venusberg ballet music. In Lohengrin (1850) Wagner again sets a story drawn from medieval legend. Here, however, the qualities of divine love and human frailty are symbolized by the Knight, who is the title character, and the maid Elsa. With music that is symbolic—the prelude suggests the descent of the Holy Grail and its return to heaven—this piece looks ahead to the music dramas that made Wagner famous.

An
epic cycle of four operas, or tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs) was a more ambitious piece of musical theater than any other devised up to that time. In this work Wagner wanted to create a “Gesamtkunstwerk,” a total work of art that fuses elements of music, drama, poetry, and stagecraft into an indivisible whole. With its massive length, its mammoth demands on both singers and instrumentalists, and its dramatic challenges to stage directors and designers, this cycle is perhaps more difficult to produce than any other opera. Comprising the Ring are Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods). The first two and part of the third were completed by 1857. The entire cycle was completed in 1874, and the first complete performance of the Ring took place in 1876—in a theater especially designed for the production by Wagner in the German town of Bayreuth. Like Wagner’s other works, the Ring represents mythological figures. The drama concerns the turbulent family history of a race of gods and their pursuit of a magical golden ring.

As well as being actors in this epic story, the characters symbolically represent differing aspects of good and evil. Wagner intensifies their importance and impact through the use of leitmotivs. These melodic and harmonic themes are associated with different situations, emotions, and feelings, and through their consistent use they come to convey the feelings and emotions of their characters—even when heard by themselves in orchestral interludes, where they are transformed and embellished.Throughout these four operas the music is not divided into recitatives and arias but written in a smoothly flowing style that incorporates the voices as strands in an unbroken orchestral fabric. Harmonically the music is remarkably advanced. Although the classical tonal system of the previous 200 years is used, it is pushed to the brink of a freer, atonal system that would be more fully developed in the 20th century by such composers as Arnold Schoenberg.

While at work on the Ring, Wagner completed two other works, Tristan und Isolde (1857–59) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, 1862–67). Tristan is characterized by a highly chromatic musical language and an almost unrelieved tragic feeling. Meistersinger is a romantic comedy, full of tuneful moments and colorful action. Wagner’s final stage work was Parsifal (1882), a profoundly moving retelling of the Easter Grail story that is notable for its solemn, sustained pace and for choral passages of great beauty.

Wagner’s influence was enormous. No composer could ignore his works; yet no composer wholly adopted Wagner’s style. At most, composers incorporated into works of their own elements of Wagner’s use of the leitmotiv.

Post-Wagner

In general
there was a reaction against the heavy music and solemn stories told in Wagner’s Ring. A reaction in Italy was provided by Pietro Mascagni, whose Cavalleria rusticana (1890) set a model for straightforward, easily grasped one-act opera. Another famous piece of this sort, known as verismo, is Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892). A finer composer still was Giacomo Puccini, whose direct and unambiguous works—La Bohème (1896), Madame Butterfly (1904), and Turandot (1926)—won their composer a large following.

French composers of the late 19th century were also somewhat influenced by Wagner. Works by Vincent d’Indy and César Franck and Gustave Charpentier’s Louise (1900) show signs of a modified use of the leitmotiv. The two finest French operas of the period, however, are singular.

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Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875)
comes from the tradition of opéra comique, in which spoken dialogue alternates with song. With its vividly drawn characters, sensuous music, and sparkling orchestrations, Carmen is considered by many to be perhaps the finest French opera. Yet its realism was considered scandalous when it was first performed. Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) makes extensive use of leitmotivs but not as prominently as in Wagner. Rather, Debussy makes them part of a diaphanous texture of sound that reflects the musical world of the impressionists.

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Richard Strauss’s works
would not have been possible without Wagner’s example of probing psychological characterization. Rather than creating extended music dramas, however, Strauss began his mature career by fashioning two powerful and shocking operas. Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) draw on Strauss’s skills as a master orchestrator of tone poems and as a composer of songs. Both works push tonality to its limits, paint lurid characters, and treat the voice with great virtuosity. After these works, though, Strauss’s career grew more conservative in such works as Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Die Frau Ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow, 1919), and Arabella (1933).

Pictorial Parade

Of Arnold Schoenberg’s three
operas, Moses und Aron, begun in 1930 and left unfinished at his death, is the best known. The operas of his disciple Alban Berg were more successful. Berg’s Wozzeck (1925), though highly organized, expresses a feeling of spontaneity and passion and tells its pathetic tale with great dramatic sensitivity.

The
first
great Russian opera was Modest Musorgski’s Boris Godunov (1874), a series of rich tableaux depicting medieval Russia. Other great Slavic operas were by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, whose Eugene Onegin (1879) is both musically rewarding and psychologically astute.

G. L. Manuel Freres—Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The
Russian Igor Stravinsky, who with Schoenberg is one of the pillars of early 20th-century music, wrote two chamber operas at the outset of his career. Le Renard (The Fox, 1917) and L’Histoire du Soldat (1918) show both French and neoclassical influence. His most substantial opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951), is also in the neoclassical vein with many references to 18th-century musical forms and allusions to Mozart and other composers.

Eastfoto

Two central European composers also contributed to the 20th-century repertory. The Hungarian Béla Bartók shows the influence of Wagner in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), but the work is even more compelling for the rich expressionism of its orchestral and vocal writing. The Czech Leoš Janáček wrote operas—Jenufa (1904), The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), and From the House of the Dead (1928)—that combine influences from Moravian folksong; from the music of such compatriots as Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana; and from the sounds of nature. This amalgam was colorfully orchestrated and varied with rhythmic subtlety.

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Among
English-speaking composers none gained the success of Benjamin Britten, whose operas entered the international repertory. Many of Britten’s finest pieces—Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), and Death in Venice (1973)—are set by the sea, reminders of the landscape and the people of the fishing town of Aldeburgh, Sussex, that was his home. In addition to the operas he wrote for the conventional opera stage, Britten also composed chamber operas—such as The Turn of the Screw (1954); operas for children—The Little Sweep (1940) and Noye’s Fludde (1958); and an opera for television—Owen Wingrave (1971). More than any other composer after World War II, he enriched the repertory available to opera companies worldwide.

Another British opera composer was Michael Tippett, whose works are admired for their melodic vitality and literary acumen. The reconciliation of opposing qualities is a constant theme in Tippett’s works, and references to earlier masterpieces are common. In The Midsummer Marriage (1955)—his first significant opera, which is loosely based on Mozart’s The Magic Flute—he deals with spiritual and emotional growth and with the darker and lighter sides of human nature. In The Knot Garden (1970), which is modeled on Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte, he treats a troubled marriage that is saved by renewed emotional commitments. In The Ice-Break (1977) he expands the scope of his reconciliation theme, dealing with the many differences between Eastern and Western societies, young and old people, and past and present.

Christian Steiner

Among
Germany’s foremost contemporary opera composers is Hans Werner Henze. In a series of major works, Henze has dealt persuasively with various aspects of an individual’s conflict with modern society. In Boulevard Solitude (1952) he offers a version of the Manon Lescaut story set by Massenet and Puccini, which deals with a woman being torn by, and ultimately dying because of her love for, two men. The Stag King (1956) refashions a fable by the 18th-century Italian writer Carlo Gozzi that portrays the conflicting demands made by a society on its leader. Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) concerns a poet who exploits the people around him, destroying them if necessary for his art.

David Gahr

The
first significant American opera composer was Virgil Thomson. A native of Kansas City, Mo., Thomson studied in Paris with the famous teacher and composer Nadia Boulanger. During his tutelage he became acquainted with the composer Erik Satie and the writer Gertrude Stein, and both of these artists influenced his work. Thomson’s operas share a musical simplicity and spareness with the works of Satie. Like music by the Frenchman, Thomson’s scores are notable for their gentle and understated humor and their simple and effective melodies. Two of his operas—Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947)—are set to texts by Stein, who added to these works a rare literary dimension.

Pictorial Parade

As
influenced by American music as Thomson’s operas were by French, George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) is considered by many to be the most significant American opera. An individualistic blend of jazz and “serious” music, this opera resembles Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha (1915) in its fusion of popular and more conventional music. Yet Gershwin’s opera has a far grander theatrical scope and a far richer musical score. It is notable for its melodic vitality, its distinctive orchestration, and its powerful dramatic characterizations. While some are unwilling to consider Porgy and Bess a true opera, believing that its music and story are both too popular for so venerable an art form, others find the work one of the glories of American musical theater.

Courtesy of RCA Records

The
most prolific of American opera composers was Gian Carlo Menotti, who found a successful blend of a melodramatic musical style influenced by Puccini and a theatrical style that often relies on lurid and stark effects. The Medium (1946) and The Telephone (1947) are often performed together and show two complementary sides of Menotti, the creator of highly charged drama and of lighthearted spoof. Like The Medium, The Consul (1950) is a richly dramatic work, though one whose music has been judged too derivative of the Italian verismo school. Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), a touching Christmas parable, was originally composed for television. The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954) resembles The Consul in its vivid theatricality but also has been found wanting in musical qualities. Menotti’s later operas—from The Last Savage (1963) to Goya (1986)—did not find the popular or critical acceptance won by his earlier works.

Far gentler in style and substance than the most successful and shocking works by Menotti are Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah (1955) and Douglas Moore’s folk opera The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956). Conservative in their musical idioms and traditional in their scenarios, these works are admired for their well-schooled academic approach to contemporary opera.

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